46th Annual Grammy Awards

• 1. Introduction

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  The 46th Annual Grammy Awards took place on the 8th of February 2004. It honored recordings, compositions, and performances from the 1st of October 2002 through the 30th of September 2003. Members of the Recording Academy cast the votes. The ceremony returned for a fourth year to the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California, with CBS carrying the broadcast. Four acts tied for the most nominations that night, with six apiece: Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Outkast, and Pharrell Williams.

  Which of those four would walk away with the most trophies, and which newcomer would beat out a rapper already famous in his own right? Which legend would take home awards that night without ever appearing on stage? And what shadow, cast by a very different broadcast just a week earlier, would hang over the whole show?

• 2. Records And Rivals

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  Beyoncé's debut album, Dangerously in Love, and its lead single "Crazy in Love" carried her to five wins on the night. That made her the most awarded artist at the ceremony. That total made her only the fourth female artist to win five Grammys in a single ceremony, following Norah Jones, Alicia Keys, and Lauryn Hill. Two more artists later tied that mark: Amy Winehouse and Alison Krauss, who each matched five wins in one night in the years that followed. Of the six artists who reached that total, Beyoncé alone never won a general field award among her five prizes that night. She broke her own record in 2010, taking six awards that night. One was Song of the Year, a general field prize, for "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)." British singer Adele tied that six-award record in 2012.

  Outkast took three awards to lead all groups, including Album of the Year for Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. That win made the double album the first, and to date the only, rap record to claim Album of the Year. It was only the second hip-hop album to win the award overall, after Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill took the prize in 1998.

  Evanescence, an American rock band, won Best New Artist, beating out four other nominees, among them the rapper 50 Cent. As the band accepted the trophy, 50 Cent walked up onto the stage himself. The Best New Artist field also included Sean Paul, who would return to the stage later that night, dueting with Sting on their song "Roxanne."

• 3. The Super Bowl Shadow

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  During the halftime show of Super Bowl XXXVIII, the week before the ceremony, Justin Timberlake briefly exposed Janet Jackson's breast on live television. Viacom, CBS's parent company, responded by blacklisting Jackson, and her invitation to perform a tribute to Luther Vandross at the ceremony was rescinded.

  Timberlake, despite his part in what came to be called the wardrobe malfunction, kept his invitation to the ceremony. He used one of his acceptance speeches that night to apologize for the incident.

  CBS also aired the ceremony itself on a five-minute tape delay, a direct precaution after the halftime broadcast controversy. Jackson, unlike Timberlake, did not appear at the ceremony at all. Vandross himself would be absent from the ceremony too, though for an entirely different reason.

• 4. The Absent Winner

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  Luther Vandross won four awards that night, but a stroke he had suffered several months earlier kept him from attending in person. His wins included Song of the Year for "Dance With My Father" and Best Male R&B Vocal Performance for the same song. He also won Best R&B Album. His fourth win was Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. He shared that prize with Beyoncé for "The Closer I Get to You."

  Patti LaBelle introduced the tribute segment built around him. Alicia Keys performed "A House Is Not a Home," and Celine Dion, joined by Richard Marx on piano, performed "Dance With My Father."

  "Whenever I say goodbye it's never for long because I believe in the power of love," Vandross said. The line came from a clip taped before the show and played during the ceremony. Vandross died the following year, in 2005.

• 5. A Posthumous Honor

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  Warren Zevon died in September 2003, just months before Grammy night. He received two posthumous awards. One was Best Contemporary Folk Album for The Wind. The other was Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, for "Disorder in the House," his duet with Bruce Springsteen.

  Six musicians took the stage to honor him: Emmylou Harris, Billy Bob Thornton, Dwight Yoakam, Jackson Browne, Jorge Calderon, and Timothy B. Schmit. Together they performed his song "Keep Me In Your Heart." That same song, cowritten by Zevon and Jorge Calderón, was also nominated for Song of the Year, one of five songs in that category.

• 6. Widows On Stage

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  Ellen DeGeneres opened the segment by marking the 40th anniversary of The Beatles' arrival in America and their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. She introduced Dave Matthews, Vince Gill, Sting, and Pharrell Williams, who performed "I Saw Her Standing There" together as the tribute's centerpiece.

  Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, the widows of two former Beatles, made an on-stage appearance of their own during the segment.

• 7. Special Honors And Farewells

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  Sting received the MusiCares Person of the Year award, one of several honors handed out beyond the night's competitive categories. Douglas Sax and Solid State Logic shared the Technical Grammy Award. Gerry Goffin and Carole King, along with Orrin Keepnews and Marian McPartland, received the Grammy Trustees Award.

  Six recipients shared the Lifetime Achievement Award: Van Cliburn, The Funk Brothers, Ella Jenkins, Sonny Rollins, Artie Shaw, and Doc Watson.

  Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" and The Beatles' "Let It Be" were among the recordings the Grammy Hall of Fame inducted that year. Johnny Cash at San Quentin and B.B. King's "Every Day I Have the Blues" were inducted as well.

  The ceremony's In Memoriam segment named several artists who had died, among them Johnny Cash, June Carter Cash, Nina Simone, and Barry White. Elliott Smith's name appeared in that same segment, alongside dozens of others the Recording Academy chose to remember that night.